Homeless in the Internet Age
So what are unemployed dot-commers up to?
One eyewitness account comes from Cynthia Brooks, who wrote: “As my son and I were driving to work via Sepulveda Boulevard, we were stopped by the signal at Moraga Drive and the 405. To our right, next to the chain-link fence adjacent to the freeway, was a 30-ish man in suit pants, shirt and tie holding a cardboard sign that read:
“ ‘HUNGRY. Will HTML for Food.’ ”
Added Brooks: “We laughed and drove on when the signal changed. At that point, we noticed his suit jacket, on a proper coat hanger, dangling from the chain-link fence.”
HTML, incidentally, stands for hypertext markup language, the code used to create Web pages.
In this case, HTML stands for hot meal, as well.
TALK ABOUT A SUBTLE MESSAGE: In Mexico, Wendy Mollett of Studio City found an unintentional reminder for vacationers to take it easy (see photo).
AND APRIL ALSO MEANS . . .: Eric Holmquist of Valencia points out that the Blue Room bar in Burbank is next to an office that may also have some blue customers this time of year (see photo).
LETTER IMPERFECT: As a how-not-to example for job seekers, West L.A. developer Thomas Safran shared a grammatically challenged note he received from an applicant for a personal assistant job (see excerpt). That’s Safran and Associates, by the way.
VAMPIRE RESIDENTIAL COMPLEX? A reader sent an announcement from the management of a mobile home park that, I believe, meant to say “blood pressure exams.” Or else something very strange is going on there (see accompanying).
STUPID DRIVER TRICKS: Tops on the list of Tom McAleer of Reseda was the motorist who drove past her exit on the San Diego Freeway and then calmly stopped, shifted into reverse and slowly backed up in her lane until she got a second chance to take that exit.
“Fortunately,” McAleer added, “she executed this successfully.”
YOU COULDN’T BLAME HER FOR RAISING HECK: The Los Alamitos News-Enterprise’s police log reported: “A woman found a man tearing off her roof without her permission; he had started a roofing job at the wrong address.”
The police log added: “And, yes, he did repair her roof.”
WAS THE VILLAIN A JOKER? In Laguna Beach, Dan Huston, an 80-year-old writer who owns a police scanner, heard a resident phone authorities to complain that a neighbor had stolen the two of clubs from her deck of cards.
TAKE THEM APPLES, PLEASE: The police log of the Irvine World News noted this prank in a display home: “Saturday, April 7, 2:38 p.m. Vandalism; plastic apples put in microwave in model units--they exploded.”
miscelLAny:
On the subject of wayward spelling checks, Margo Kline of Santa Barbara says that a friend who is a legal secretary “ran a spell check on a document she was producing and it cleared with no errors.”
Luckily her friend checked the hard copy, anyway.
Kline said: “She found the fetching phrase ‘doe snot,’ instead of the boring old ‘does not’ that she thought she had typed.”
Oh, deer!
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Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.
